Answering the following questions is a big help:

1. What version of distcc are you using (e.g. "2.7.1")?
distcc 3.0 x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

2. What platform are you running on (e.g. "Red Hat 8.0", "HP-UX 11.11")?
Linux gold 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jul 23 03:56:11 EDT 2008 x86_64
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

3. What were you trying to do (e.g. "install distcc", "build Mozilla")?
run pump mode with a host file in PREFIX location given to configure script
$PREFIX/etc/distcc/hosts to list of possible host files (which distcc does
look into if it cannot find any other hosts file)

4. What went wrong?  Did you get an error message, did it hang, did it
build a program that didn't work, did it not distribute compilation to
machines that ought to get it?
pump: expected environment variables "DISTCC_HOSTS" or
"DISTCC_POTENTIAL_HOSTS" to be set, or to find a distcc hosts file in
"$DISTCC_DIR/hosts", "$HOME/.distcc/hosts", or "/etc/distcc/hosts"

5. If you have an example of a compiler invocation that failed, quote it,
in full e.g.:
pump make

6. What error logging do you get?
see above

7. If you got an error message on stderr, quote that error exactly. Find
the lines in the log files pertaining to the compile, and include all of
them in your report, by looking at the process ID in square brackets. If
you can't work that out, quote the last few hundred lines leading up to the
failure.
see above

I do not have a patch that I could contribute, since I am not very familiar
configure scripts, but basically to the pump script, when configured, the
following could be added:
 
    if [ -z "$DISTCC_HOSTS" ] &&
       [ -z "$DISTCC_DIR" -o ! -f "$DISTCC_DIR/hosts" ] &&
       [ -z "$HOME" -o ! -f "$HOME/.distcc/hosts" ] &&
       [ ! -f "/etc/distcc/hosts" ]
    then
 
should become 

    if [ -z "$DISTCC_HOSTS" ] &&
       [ -z "$DISTCC_DIR" -o ! -f "$DISTCC_DIR/hosts" ] &&
       [ -z "$HOME" -o ! -f "$HOME/.distcc/hosts" ] &&
       [ ! -f "/etc/distcc/hosts" ] &&
       [ ! -f "$PREFIX/etc/distcc/hosts" ]
    then
 
where PREFIX is given to the configure script by --prefix=PREFIX